The Money Show withBruce Whitfield

Each week, Breakfast Show producer, Bruce Hong, looks at the latest dam levels for the 6 major dams that supply the Cape Town region and surrounds.

Looking at the figures as measured on 21 June, the overall dam levels are at 40.9% of total storage capacity and there was an increase of 8.8 percentage points over the 7-day period from 14-21 June.

This is significantly above the figures for the same period in recent years (2015 – 2017) and slightly higher than the same week in 2014, when it was a relatively “wet” season.

For the four-week period from 23 May to 21 June, the dam levels for 2018 have gone up by 18.8 percentage points. This is a major improvement compared to the same time period for the years 2015 to 2017, and slightly below the 2014 period (increase of 21.7percentage points), says Hong.

And according to the accumulated rainfall data, as per UCT’s Climate System Analysis Group (http://www.csag.uct.ac.za/) the total amount of rain received so far this year over various catchment areas is better than past three years and just below that for 2014.

However, Hong cautions that we are by no means out of the woods yet, as our dams were 93.6% full at this time in 2014, and we’re still a long way from there at the present moment.